Thursday, January 4, 2018

It’s a new year, and my fingers are
rusty on this keyboard after the holidays.
It’s very cold outside. I went
outside to brush away the snow, so that it won’t freeze on the walkways, and then
more snow fell, so then I had to do it again. I’ve got a snowblind variety of déjà vu.

Why does our Gregorian calendar begin in
winter? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable
to begin new years with the spring equinox?
Maybe then we would feel more optimistic about new beginnings. It’s hard to be cheerful when icicles are
dripping off your nose.

In our calendar, the new year always appears
as a cold dunking into reality, since the year begins with the sun in
Capricorn. And 2018 is an
extra-Capricornian year, with Saturn and Pluto lingering in this sign. By the time we get to the new moon at mid-January,
there will be six planets in Capricorn.

Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, and so
this is a very Saturnine year. Saturn is
all about scarcity and deprivation, about contraction and resistance, and so
these will be the motifs of the coming year.
The Resistance that we saw in 2017 was still fairly robust, but as
resources get tighter, as the economic flow slows, we’ll see a different kind
of Resistance in 2018. It will be leaner
and meaner, more entrenched, more efficient.

As we stand poised at the edge of this
Saturnine year, let’s look more closely at Saturn. Of all the planets used in astrology, Saturn is
most often interpreted as bad luck or bad news.
I’ve been studying my own transiting aspects for forty years, and I’ve
had my share of bad Saturn trips. Pain,
anger, paralysis, depression, disillusionment, and despair - these are all associated with hard Saturn aspects.

So Saturn is connected to
suffering. And suffering is something
that all humans endure, an intrinsic part of our path as physical beings. We are tied to this wheel from the moment of
our births. We’re constrained by time
and space, by the needs of our bodies, by the webs of responsibility we
inherit. Once we are here, there’s no
second-guessing – and Mother Nature plays her part here, giving us the same
instinct to live as every other creature.

Saturn is about form. Having achieved form as living beings, what
do we do now? What forms are essential,
and will maintain this life? What forms
make us safer, and ward away danger? Saturn
builds and maintains structures – fences, walls, turrets, towers. These reflect our need to be placed somewhere; they symbolize our physical existence here, in
our bodies and on our planet.

And if we were snails, we would be happy
with our strong Saturnine structures, and never feel constrained by them. But we are not often content to live
enclosed, secure lives. And so Saturn is
perceived as painful – restricting, binding, freezing, calcifying. If we look in our pasts, we can see ourselves
building these structures. When did they
become our jails?

To protect the forms we build, we
enshrine them, one way or another. They become
further walled by truisms, rules, traditions, religion, or law. And those of us who are most invested in them
will guard them most zealously. This
makes perfect sense, remembering that every form symbolizes our bodies. If this seems too abstract, think of how
often in human history the laws have fallen, and the streets filled with blood.

But there is no mercy in these
walls. There is no poetry. And there is so much fear built into each
stone.

In this Saturnine year, more
stripped-down forms will predominate.
What is it that promotes survival?
It’s clear that there’s no security in gilded palaces full of foppish
kings and bitter gossiping couriers. A
great deal of trickery will not survive Saturn’s scythe. This year is like a winter storm, reducing
everything to its basic principles.

We will be looking back, far back - way
beyond the years that are celebrated by racists and red-hatters. We need to remember how the crones did it, in
the dawn of time. How did they practice right livelihood? How did they bring the sacred into their
daily lives? What did they do with their
fear?

There’s a humbling in this, and it will come
to all of us. Saturn is the Teacher, and
so we all need to learn how to learn. This
means opening our minds. And perhaps we
can echo that in our structures, giving them more light and air, more choices
and possibilities.